Naming Torrents

Dealing with spaces while scripting or in terminal is such a pain in the ass. The true dark path of horror is using spaces indeed.
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  I work on a Web app and we recently decided that we're just not gonna support double quotes in free text fields because oh holy balls what a thing it is to try to deal with those in a way that doesn't open you up to multiple encoding vulnerabilities.
- It's a way bigger pain in the ass than people think it is. I remember having to parse output from a tool for work that had tons of output in tabular format, mixed with normal sentence like strings. JSON, YAML, or XML outputs weren't available so I had to do a nasty mess of grep, awk, cut, and head/tail, to get what I wanted. My first attempt was literally counting the characters so I could cut out exactly what I needed, but as we all know, hardcoding values is a recipe for headaches later on.
  
  Here's a horror story from literally yesterday. We have been fighting a system for a client for weeks and it has been a nightmare. Our clients just told us that they outsourced some of their work to an Indian outfit but that outfit is unfamiliar with Linux and doesn't know how to edit text files so they have been downloading the files to their Windows machines, editing them in Windows, then uploading the contaminated text files back into Linux. None of them, not our client nor the outfit they hired, understood why this was a problem. We have no idea what files are affected and we won't know until they fail because they obviously did not keep track of what they touched.
  EDIT: I'm being intentionally vague.
- “\ “ and [tab] and * are your friends. I’ve been using spaces in Unix filesystems since the early 90s with no issues. Also, using terminal fonts that•put•a•faint•dot•in•each•space•character helps.
  
  Yeah, either put quotes around it '/like this/you can incorporate/spaces/into your paths' or /just escape/your spaces/like this
  
  Yeah but at least with periods in the title tab complete will just complete the file name all the way while with a filename with spaces I have to escape the damn space with "\ " like you said. Why do more work when I don't have to?
- Yeah I was gonna say this is something anyone in tech knows, spaces are a plague

- Standards and CONSEQUENCES
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuke_%28warez%29

I prefer dots over spaces.
Spaces can mess with stuff, double space...
- I.too.prefer.dots.over.spaces.
  
  :%s/./ /g
- I prefer  
- Dots sometimes pose problems in arrs.
  
  Yeah I had dots on my arse once. Turned out I'd been sitting on my keyboard

Either are fine, I just wish there was a more consistent standard like naming ROMs. I want to be able to script renaming everything for Kodi
- Look up SMDB (smoke monster's database). You can download a tool (I forget what it's actually called, I think one is called ROM manager) which reads the SMDB files and compares the hashes to your ROMs and will categorize and rename them for you. It looks for duplicates, unofficial releases/hacks/patches, categorizes them by country (US, EU and Japan largely), and more. It's a pretty nifty tool.
  I spent like two hours going through PS1 ROMs and was like "there's got to be a better way!" (insert cheesy black and white infomerical cutaway), started looking up stuff and there it was. Not all game systems are supported (mostly NES, SNES, Genesis/MegaDrive, and a few others) but you can build SMDB "packs" yourself.
  I forget if it works on Windows, but I know it works on Linux and it's either a script or a compiled binary, I forget which, but you can definitely script it, I've done so myself since the command string tends to be a bit long.
- I think your workflow is not optimal. Are you using software like Radarr and Sonarr? They do the renaming for you and come with Kodi integration. Or is this not feasible?
  
  I think OP means ROM files for video games systems. Kodi has a RetroArch plugin. As I'm sure you're aware, Sonarr and Radarr only do TV shows and movies, respectively. Managing ROM packs is a pain in the ass because there are usually thousands of files in a pack (I think there's something stupid like 9,000 ROMs for NES or SNES).
  
  Oh it’s totally inefficient. It’s not the most feasible with my current setup, so I’m making do with what I have at the moment.
- In my experience, files are named pretty well these days to include resolution, source, the actual title and release year, video format, audio format, language, and release group.
  Try looking at the way music files are named and you'll see how awful naming conventions can get.

why not use underscores?
- I've always liked underscores better because it differentiates from the file extension. It just makes sense. Except it is a wider character, so it'd be longer.
  
  well if you're using a mono font (terminal) then there are no such thing as wider characters anyway, so for me that's not a drawback either
  
  Gotta hit shift though. Period, ezpz.
- They are ugly. Just use -
  
  kebab-case-for-the-win
  
  What happens when a hyphen is used in a movie title? I think that's frequent enough, versus an underscore or a period.
- Underscores require you to use the Shift key.
  
  Do you type with one hand?
  And well even if you did you could hold down right shift instead of left shift to only use a single hand.

Using spaces is so inconsiderate.

It's quite strange, I've been downloading torrents for more years than I can count, and I upload them from time to time, and I've always had the worry myself of how to name torrents: with dots? underscores? dashes? (although with spaces is definitely not an option).
I've even asked the questions on several forums and upload sites, read tutorials on these same sites etc and every time I've asked the answer has been: THERE IS NO STANDARD, even on the tutorials, I've never seen anything mentioned such a thing.
All this to say that I'm making a meme, and after so many years, this is the first time I've heard of a Warez scene, and several times in the same comments!, curious, isn't it? I wish I'd heard about it before.
- You should know that in most filesystems that are not NTFS, spaces in file names are not well supported.
  
  Can you give examples? Linux and Mac have no real issues as far as I'm aware. Nor exFAT or FAT32
- Clearly the best option then is to just use some of each. Like this: "MovieTitle-2000.Your_mom h.265"
- Scene has standards. You don't have to be scene to use scene naming standards. https://scenerules.org

- This.is.a.meme.
  
  This.is.a.meme.exe

As soon as the file finishes downloading it becomes only the name of the movie.filetype
I can't stand the titles on torrents.
- “Titles”? It’s not a title, it’s a file name that contains a lot of details about the rip. In the post’s example it tells you that it’s the movie Split, ripped from blu ray, in 1080p, with audio tracks in Italian and English, and encoded in x265. You probably would hate a lot more not being able to tell the difference between split.mp4 recorded on my cellphone in the movie theater and split.mp4 in ultra hd 4k ripped straight from Netflix.
  
  Lol, okay. Calm down buddy. What I do doesn't affect you. The torrent description let's me know all that too, I just hate having those file names in my library, looks messy and it's less easy for my eyes to browse quickly.

Should be a hyphen instead of period before NAHOM.

Why are spaces bad? Does it mess with sonarr/radar or something?
- It's legacy, white spaces weren't allowed as characters on most FTP software, which is how the warez scene shares it's releases. It used to be underscores, but dots are closer to a white space regarding separation (space wise), so most release groups use dots nowadays.
  Generally, a white space as a character in filenames and directories is "frowned upon" in many operating systems, Windows included (somewhat). It makes writing scripts and software more comlicated because it's used as as a separator for giving command line/terminal options to commands and binaries (programs).
  
  it goes way back before ftp.. i believe its because the original operating systems filesystems/namespacing could not handle the space character at all. so all files lacked spaces in their names. but only for like the first 30 years
- Spaces are a headache whenever you're not using a graphical interface.
  
  Quote\escape all the things!

Name [Year] (1080p265)
This is how I sort my movies at least
- Mine is: [Year] Name [Languages][Resolution]
  
  [Year] Name
  For me. I don't care about resolution after I've downloaded it. Heck, I don't need to know the resolution before downloading, I can tell by the file size.
  
  I usually add tvdb id for Series so that fixing identification problems in jellyfin is easier.

i just let radarr do it for me nowadays

When searching, dots, when downloading, who cares?
When searching, dots act as and, spaces as or (at least in qtorrent). The dots makes searching easier.
- What do all the commas do?

It's supposed to be a dash before the group name.

Just name them in scene format even if you're not scene.

In this day and age where most of not all modern media library management software can decipher almost anything without any problem, is that really an issue?
- Yes.

Why there has to be a reason?